Facebook, Twitter & MySpace Censure Google

A couple of weeks ago, Google launched Search, plus Your World, which aimed to find the best search results for you pulling in detail from your social networks.

However the results returned meant that pages from Google’s own social network, Google , featured at the top of the list despite these results not being the most relevant. This, as you can imagine, did not sit well with the likes of Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.

But rather than just moan about it, the companies have clubbed together and brought out an add-on which uses Google’s own relevance measure - the ranking of their organic search results - to determine what social content should appear in the areas where Google results are currently hardcoded.

The add-on or bookmarklet, which is available for the Firefox, Chrome and Safari browsers but not Internet Explorer, is cheekily called “Don’t be Evil” – a reference to an early Google motto. The Google update has only been rolled out in the US, so you'll only notice the changes in the US and not on Google.co.uk for example.

According to the Focus on the User group, searching for cooking in Google with the new update returns Jamie Oliver’s Google page first even though this hasn’t been updated in two months. When carrying out the same search with the Don’t be Evil add-on, Jamie’s Twitter account is returned at the top of the list, with the Google entry not even appearing on the first page.

Google has declined to comment on the situation so far.

Have you noticed any changes in the results thrown up by Google since the Search, plus Your World update? Let us know in the comments.